ELISSA BLAKE
Who gets to wear the trousers in opera? Surprisingly often, it's the women. For at least 300 years, female singers have donned breeches, frock coats and boots to play the many "trouser roles" in operas by composers including Handel, Mozart, Massenet and Offenbach.

ELISSA BLAKE
After spending many weeks in a windowless editing suite working on a final cut of a film, you might expect a movie director to go sit on a beach somewhere and get some horizon. Not John Crowley.

ELISSA BLAKE
Some in the audience may not have the developmental chops to clap their hands together just yet, and a lot depends on nap time. But that doesn't mean babies aged six to 18 months can't enjoy a trip to the theatre, says Sarah Argent of the Welsh company Theatr Iolo.

ELISSA BLAKE
"I have no news of my coming or passing away – the whole thing happened quicker than a breath; ask no questions of the moth." So goes the poem by Farid ud-Din Attar. It would be safe to say there aren't many comedians on the Aussie circuit who would see the title of their next stand-up tour in a poem by a 12th-century Persian mystic.

ANNABEL ROSS
Teddy Tahu Rhodes and Antoinette Halloran have a history of violence. The last time they shared a stage, in 2009, it was in Bruce Beresford's production of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire.

ELISSA BLAKE
Every morning at 8.45am the Royal Samoa Police Band marches from the police station to government house in the capital of Apia playing Viennese and German brass band music. It makes a strikingly alien sound among the palm trees.

ELISSA BLAKE
A play based on the descecration of an ANZAC memorial has been dubbed "Romper Stomper for teenagers" as it examines the xenophobic reactions of five young women to the arrival of a refugee family.

Stage and screen

Edward McAllister
Roger Rees, the Tony Award-winning British stage actor who had roles in U.S. television hits including "Cheers" and "The West Wing", died on Friday aged 71, his representative said on Saturday.

Snapshots of conversations

ELISSA BLAKE
The desire to reproduce is written into our genes. So why do we fall in love? Does love give our lives meaning or is it just a function of our drive to propagate the species? And, in this era of the omnipresent smartphone, how do we connect in real life? How can we deal with information overload and the intangibles of love?

ELISSA BLAKE
Wind-whipped sand. Icy southern breezes. Bondi can seem forbidding in the depths of a Sydney winter. To beat the chill, the organisers of the annual Bondi Feast festival suggest you stay indoors, all day and all evening - at their place, The Bondi Pavilion theatre and bar.

Top 10 Stage

Once asked what Waiting for Godot was about, Beckett replied: ''It's all symbiosis.'' That was as close as he came to admitting Godot is fundamentally a love story, yet Roger Rees and Ian McKellen suffuse the relationship between Vladimir and Estragon with such a delicately realised intimacy that it's impossible to see it any other way.